Abstract
In a randomized controlled trial, we evaluated the effect on tobacco use onset among middle school students of Family Communications (FC) activities designed to mobilize parental influences against tobacco use and Youth Anti-tobacco Activities (YAT) designed to market anti-tobacco norms to adolescents. We conducted a simple, two-condition experimental design in which 40 middle schools, with a prevalence of tobacco use at or above the Oregon median, received, by random assignment, either the intervention or no intervention. State, county, and local prevention coordinators around Oregon served as liaisons to schools. To generate interest, staff made presentations to these groups and distributed marketing packets at several conferences. Dependent variables were indices of smoking prevalence and use of smokeless tobacco (ST) in the prior month. Additionally, we created an intervention manual so that other communities could replicate this study. The findings suggest that efforts to influence parents to discourage their children’s tobacco use and efforts to market an anti-tobacco perspective to teens are effective in preventing smoking. The impact of YAT is consistent with experimental and nonexperimental evaluations of media campaigns to influence young people not to smoke.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Lifetime smoking data were missing for 42 C2 cases from the mixed-model ANCOVA. In the nested time × condition analysis, we removed 1,961 surveys due to missing data, but only 84 of those had data at both pretest and posttest. We eliminated these cases since we included only nonsmokers.
References
Ary, D., Duncan, T., Biglan, A., Metzler, C., Noell, J., & Smolkowski, K. (1999a). Development of adolescent problem behavior. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 27, 141–150.
Ary, D. V., Duncan, T. E., Duncan, S. C., & Hops, H. (1999b). Adolescent problem behavior: The influence of parents and peers. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 37, 217–230.
Barnes-Holmes, D., Keane, J., & Barnes-Holmes, Y. (2000). A derived transfer of emotive functions as a means of establishing differential preferences for soft drinks. The Psychological Record, 50, 493–511.
Barry, A. E. (2005). How attrition impacts the internal and external validity of longitudinal research. Journal of School Health, 75(7), 267–270.
Biglan, A. (2004). Direct written testimony in the case of the U.S.A. vs. Phillip Morris et al. U.S. Department of Justice. Available at http://www.ori.org/oht/testimony.html.
Biglan, A., Ary, D. V., Koehn, V., Levings, D., Smith, S., Wright, Z., et al. (1996a). Mobilizing positive reinforcement in communities to reduce youth access to tobacco. American Journal of Community Psychology, 24, 625–638.
Biglan, A., Ary, D. V., Smolkowski, K., Duncan, T. E., & Black, C. (2000). A randomized control trial of a community intervention to prevent adolescent tobacco use. Tobacco Control, 9, 24–32.
Biglan, A., Ary, D., Yudelson, H., Duncan, T. E., & Hood, D. (1996b). Experimental evaluation of a modular approach to mobilizing anti-tobacco influences of peers and parents. American Journal of Community Psychology, 24, 311–339.
Biglan, A., Duncan, T. E., Ary, D. V., & Smolkowski, K. (1995b). Peer and parental influences on adolescent tobacco use. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 18, 315–330.
Biglan, A., Henderson, J., Humphreys, D., Yasui, M., Whisman, R., Black, C., et al. (1995a). Mobilizing positive reinforcement to reduce youth access to tobacco. Tobacco Control, 4, 42–48.
Biglan, A., James, L. E., LaChance, P., Zoref, L., & Joffe, J. (1988). Videotaped materials in a school-based smoking prevention program. Preventive Medicine, 17, 559–84.
Biglan, A., & Smolkowski, K. (2002). Intervention effects on adolescent drug use and critical influences on the development of problem behavior. In D. B. Kandel (Ed.) Stages and pathways of drug involvement: Examining the Gateway Hypothesis (pp. 158–183). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Chassin, L. A., Corty, E., Presson, C. C., Olshavsky, R. W., Bensenberg, M., & Sherman, S. L. (1981). Predicting adolescents initiation to smoke cigarettes. Journal of Health and Social Behaviors, 22, 445–455.
Donner, A., & Klar, N. (1996). Statistical considerations in the design and analysis of community intervention trials. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 49, 435–439.
Farrelly, M. C., Davis, K. C., Haviland, M. L., Messeri, P., & Healton, C. G. (2005). Evidence of a dose–response relationship between “truth” antismoking ads and youth smoking prevalence. American Journal of Public Health, 95, 425–431.
Farrelly, M. C., Healton, C. G., Davis, K. C., Messeri, P., Hersey, J. C., & Haviland, M. L. (2002). Getting to the truth: Evaluating national tobacco counter-marketing campaigns. American Journal of Public Health, 92, 901–907.
Farrelly, M. C., Niederdeppe, J., & Yarsevich, J. (2003). Youth tobacco prevention mass media campaigns: Past, present, and future directions. Tobacco Control, 12, 35i.
Fitzmaurice, G. M., Laird, N. M., & Ware, J. H. (2004). Applied longitudinal analysis. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Forrester, K., Biglan, A., Severson, H. H., & Smolkowski, K. (2007). Predictors of smoking onset over two years. Tobacco Control, 9, 1259–1267.
Gibbons, R., Hedeker, D., Elkin, I., & Waternaux, C. (1993). Some conceptual and statistical issues in analysis of longitudinal psychiatric data: Application to the NIMH Treatment of Depression CRP dataset. Archives of General Psychiatry, 50, 739–750.
Graham, J. W., & Donaldson, S. I. (1993). Evaluating interventions with differential attrition: The importance of nonresponse mechanisms and use of follow-up data. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78, 119–128.
Grey, I. M., & Barnes, D. (1996). Stimulus equivalence and attitudes. Psychological Record, 46, 243–270.
Hannan, P. J., & Murray, D. M. (1996). Gauss or Bernoulli? A Monte Carlo comparison of the performance of the linear mixed-model and the logistic mixed-model analyses in simulated community trials with a dichotomous outcome variable at the individual level. Evaluation Review, 20, 338–352.
Hox, J. (2002). Multilevel analysis techniques and applications. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hunter, J. E., & Schmidt, F. L. (2004). Methods of meta-analysis: Correcting error and bias in research findings (2nd ed.). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Jaccard, J., & Turrisi, R. (2003). Interaction effects in multiple regression (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Janega, J. B., Murray, D. M., Varnell, S. P., Blitstein, J. L., Birnbaum, A. S., & Lytle, L. A. (2004a). Assessing intervention effects in a school-based nutrition intervention trial: Which analytic model is most powerful? Health Education and Behavior, 31, 756–774.
Janega, J. B., Murray, D. M., Varnell, S. P., Blitstein, J. L., Birnbaum, A. S., & Lytle, L. A. (2004b). Assessing the most powerful analysis method for school-based intervention studies with alcohol, tobacco, and other drug outcomes. Addictive Behaviors, 29, 595–606.
Kreft, I., & de Leeuw, J. (1998). Introducing multilevel modeling. London: Sage.
Laird, N. M. (1988). Missing data in longitudinal studies. Statistics in Medicine, 7, 305–315.
Little, R. J., & Rubin, D. B. (2002). Statistical analysis with missing data (2nd ed). New York: Wiley.
Maas, C. J. M., & Hox, J. J. (2004a). Robustness issues in multilevel regression analysis. Statistica Neerlandica, 58, 127–137.
Maas, C., & Hox, J. (2004b). The influence of violations of assumptions on multilevel parameter estimates and their standard errors. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 46, 427–440.
Metzler, C. W., Noell, J. W., Biglan, A., Ary, D. V., & Smolkowski, K. (1994). The social context for risky sexual behavior among adolescents. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 17, 419–438.
Murray, D. M. (1998). Design and analysis of group-randomized trials. New York: Oxford University Press.
Murray, D. M., Hannan, P. J., & Baker, W. L. (1996). A Monte Carlo study of alternative responses to intraclass correlation in community trials. Evaluation Review, 20, 313–337.
Murray, D. M., Hannan, P. J., Pals, S. P., McCowen, R. G., Baker, W. L., & Blitstein, J. L. (2006a). A comparison of permutation and mixed-model regression methods for the analysis of simulated data in the context of a group-randomized trial. Statistics in Medicine, 25, 375–388.
Murray, D. M., Hannan, P. J., Wolfinger, R. D., Baker, W. L., & Dwyer, J. H. (1998). Analysis of data from group-randomized trials with repeat observations on the same groups. Statistics in Medicine, 17, 1581–1600.
Murray, D. M., Van Horn, M. L., Hawkins, J. D., & Arthur, M. W. (2006b). Analysis strategies for a community trial to reduce adolescent ATOD use: A comparison of random coefficient and ANOVA/ANCOVA models. Contemporary Clinical Trials, 27, 188–206.
National Cancer Institute (2008). The use of the media to promote and discourage tobacco use (NCI Monograph 20). Bethesda, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, in press.
Nich, C., & Carroll, K. (1997). Now you see it, now you don’t: A comparison of traditional versus random-effects regression models in the analysis of longitudinal follow-up data from a clinical trial. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 65, 252–261.
Palmgreen, P., Donohew, L., Lorch, E. P., Hoyle, R. H., & Stephenson, M. T. (2002). Television campaigns and sensation-seeking targeting of adolescent marijuana use: A controlled time-series approach. In R. C. Hornik (Ed.) Public health communication: Evidence for behavior change. pp 35–56. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Pechmann, C. (2001). A comparison of health communication models: Risk learning versus stereotype priming. Media Psychology, 3, 189–210.
Pechmann, C., & Reibling, E. T. (2000). Planning an effective anti-smoking mass media campaign targeting adolescents. Journal of Public Health Management Practice, 6, 80–94.
Petraitis, J., Flay, B. R., & Miller, T. Q. (1995). Reviewing theories of adolescent substance use: Organizing pieces in the puzzle. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 67–86.
Pierce, J. P., Choi, W. S., Gilpin, E. A., Farkas, A. J., & Merritt, R. K. (1996). Validation of susceptibility as a predictor of which adolescents take up smoking in the United States. Health Psychology, 15, 355–361.
Rosenthal, R., Rosnow, R. L., & Rubin, D. B. (2000). Contrasts and effect sizes in behavioral research: A correlational approach. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rosenthal, R., & Rubin, D. B. (2003). r equivalent: A simple effect size indicator. Psychological Methods, 8, 492–496.
Rubin, D. B. (1976). Inference and missing data. Biometrika, 63, 581–592.
SAS Institute (2002). SAS OnlineDoc 9: SAS/STAT 9 user's guide, volumes 1, 2, and 3. Cary, NC: SAS Institute.
Schafer, J. L., & Graham, J. W. (2002). Missing data: Our view of the state of the art. Psychological Methods, 7, 147–177.
Shadish, W. R., Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
Singer, J. D., & Willett, J. B. (2003). Applied longitudinal data analysis: Modeling change and event occurrence. New York: Oxford University Press.
Smeets, P. M., & Barnes-Holmes, D. (2003). Children’s emergent preferences for soft drinks: Stimulus-equivalence and transfer. Journal of Economic Psychology, 24, 603–618.
Smolkowski, K., Biglan, A., Dent, C., & Seeley, J. (2006). The multilevel structure of four adolescent problems. Prevention Science, 7, 239–256.
van Belle, G. (2002). Statistical rules of thumb. New York: Wiley.
Venter, A., Maxwell, S. E., & Bolig, E. (2002). Power in randomized group comparisons: The value of adding a single intermediate time point to a traditional pretest–posttest design. Psychological Methods, 7, 194–209.
Verbeke, G., & Molenberghs, G. (2000). Linear mixed models for longitudinal data. New York: Springer.
Worden, J. K. (1999). Research in using mass media to prevent smoking. Nicotine and Tobacco Research, 1, S117–S121.
Worden, J. K., Flynn, B. S., Geller, B. M., Chen, M., Shelton, L. G., Secker-Walker, R. H., et al. (1988). Development of a smoking prevention mass media program using diagnostic and formative research. Preventive Medicine, 17, 531–558.
Worden, J. K., Secker-Walker, R. H., Pirie, P. L., Badger, G. J., Carpenter, J. H., & Geller, B. M. (1994). Mass media and school interventions for cigarette smoking prevention: Effects 2 years after completion. American Journal of Public Health, 84, 1148–1150.
Acknowledgements
National Cancer Institute Grant CA86169 supported this research and completion of this paper. We give special thanks to Lisa James, Colleen Lemhouse, Megan Martin, Carla Remenschatis, Jill Roche, Radha Sosienski, Nora Van Meter, and Chris Widdop, all vital to the project’s success. We thank all who assisted with data collection, preparation, and analyses, including Shawn Boles, Martin Hankins, Helen Kuo, Yvonne Kuo, James Spencer, and Joy Wells. We are grateful to Intervision, whose creative staff helped produce project videos. Finally, we thank Christine Cody for editorial and reference assistance in production of this manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gordon, J., Biglan, A. & Smolkowski, K. The Impact on Tobacco Use of Branded Youth Anti-tobacco Activities and Family Communications about Tobacco. Prev Sci 9, 73–87 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-008-0089-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-008-0089-6